AGNES Program: Open Secret features artists Parastoo Anoushahpour (19 + 20 January), Kriss Li (9 + 10 February), Sharlene Bamboat (9 + 10 March) and Sofía Gallisá Muriente (5 + 6 April). The series of screenings and workshops take its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret,” and evokes cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering. The double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in cinema’s making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration. 

Sharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her practice often engages with translation, history and music, uncovering sensory and fractured ways of knowing. 

SCREENING: If from Every Tongue It Drips (2021) explores questions of distance and proximity, identity and otherness, through scenes from the daily interactions between two queer women—a poet and a cameraperson. Created between three locations: Montreal, Batticaloa and the Isle of Skye, and connected through languages–Urdu, Tamil & English, personal and national histories, music and dance, and the gaze of the camera lens, they explore subjects both expansively cosmic and intimately close—from quantum superposition to the links between British colonialism and Indian nationalism.